So the trend for outsourcing is really
being fueled by technology, people being able to jump online and find work
in bite-size
quantities and small jobs. It works better for them in terms of
staying flexible and using weekends and
afternoons and increasing their income, it works better for companies
who are able to
stay flexible and get a lot more done, tap into a vast
labour force that they can't hire in-house
and they can't afford to go to consultancies and agencies and whatnot.
So really it's been natural evolution that's been fueled by
the internet and now mobile telephony and smartphones. A lot of us,
we have an app on a smartphone we're seeing increasingly people go
on mobile and actually search for projects to actually do or outsource.
Recession helped, you know, it's also been
timing is everything in business, so when technology coincides with
the economic cycle, magic things happen
and that's exactly what's happened in the space of outsourcing or working online.
So the benefits to small businesses, well if you think of it this way,
we have half a million
active freelancers our website, which are ready to work for you
within an hour. That's bigger than the
workforce of Tesco's, or HSBC for that matter.
It's bigger than Ford Motors. So if you think about how powerful this
is for a
small business today, to have access to
a workforce as big as these huge multinationals that have been built over
decades,
that's really what it comes down to. And obviously,
the beauty of it is that you don't have to hire them on your books and pay
that massive payroll bill. You can access them when you want to.
And the the skills diversity within that pool is huge. It goes from technologists, to
designers, to copywriters, to people are gonna do
data entry at a huge fraction of the cost.
It's all over the world, so there's a difference in rates, so you can hire
someone in India or in the Philippines or in the UK if you want some speaks
the language and understands the culture.
I think it's more powerful than we realize today,
it's like having a massive workforce
that normally, traditionally, takes decades to build and a huge investment,
having it ready at your fingertips, no setup cost whatsoever.
So if you're a small business, if you go to our website peopleperhour.com, for example,
it works very simply. You post a job,
describe what you need, and then
it goes to people with relevant skills to start bidding, essentially,
on your job
within hours. So what amazes most people,
there's still a disbelief about how this concept can actually work online,
but when they see the proposals trickling in within hours,
and typically they'll get maybe a dozen within a day, they're actually quite amazed, you can see
reviews of those people
and what other people have said about them, other companies who have hired them and worked with them,
you can see
portfolios of their work online, whether it's
visual or Word documents, Excel spreadsheets etc.
So really the information you get within a few hours,
of the caliber of talent you can hire is incredible compared to
the traditional way of doing things, where you have to,
you know, get a recruiter and a CV and hire someone and you have to actually commit
to long-term
contracts etc. So the best way is to just jump online, post a job
and see what you get. It's free to post a job so there's nothing to lose.
We keep it free because we know we can deliver,
we know that when people do have a requirement and a person in sight,
then they do tend to get very good
freelancers coming through.
We've also launched a new product which we also have on the iPhone and an Android app
called 'Hourlies'. That's about a year old now, but it's actually our fastest growing product
and what Hourlies is, is essentially bite-size jobs that you
arrange to start immediately, so you don't have to post, you don't have to post proposals,
you can actually see them on display.
You can see, essentially, the jobs that are advertised by
freelancers saying 'I can do one hour of copy editing for you
tomorrow'. So people who have down time and they have spare
capacity, they're essentially putting that time and that talent
out on display and attaching a price to it that's fixed and you can just click a
button and start,
essentially purchase it. It's essentially productising
time and work in a way that makes it totally frictionless for a buyer to just,
for a company to say, 'Right, now I can actually get a video produced within hours',
so in that cases you don't actually have to request anythings
you just browse like you do on a shopping site sometimes, like window shopping.
You're browsing a website and saying 'that's interesting' and you just buy it.
So there's these two key ways of doing it really,
and as I said, it's online at peopleperhour.com
or it's on an Android or on our
iPhone app. You can just search for PeoplePerHour on
on the iPhone store, on the iTunes Store or on the
Android store.